Libertarians and liberal Republicans have been proposing a truce on social issues in order to be able to concentrate on fiscal issues, but there is no such thing as a truce on any issue with the left.

Brendan Eich offered the left a truce on gay marriage. He talked about tolerance and diversity and he got his head handed to him. His forced departure from the Mozilla Foundation, which is behind the Firefox browser, should be a wake up call to anyone on the right who still thinks that social issues can be taken off the table and that we can all agree to disagree.

Those on the right who insist that conservatism should be reduced to fiscal issues imagine that the culture war is a fight that the right picked with the left. Nothing could be further from the truth.

The left does not care about gay marriage. In most left-wing regimes, homosexuality was persecuted. It was illegal in the USSR. Gay men were locked up in Cuba and are still targeted in China. Nicolas Maduro, the current hero of the left, openly uses homophobic language without any criticism from his Western admirers. It goes without saying that homosexuality is criminalized throughout the Muslim world.

Engels viewed homosexuality as a perversion born out of the bourgeois way of life that would be eliminated under socialism. The Revolutionary Communist Party of the United States stated that homosexuality “is a product of the decay of capitalism” and vowed that once the revolution took place, a “struggle will be waged to eliminate it and reform homosexuals.”

The left’s shift on this issue, as on many issues, was purely tactical. The left’s leading lights were racists who jumped into civil rights. They were sexists who became feminists. They were advocates for the working class who despised the idea of working for a living.

The culture war does not emerge from the left’s deeply held beliefs. Its leaders could care less about the things that they pretend to care about. It emerges instead from the need to maintain a constant state of domestic conflict.

You can’t have a truce when the other side wants a war.

Did the activists who claimed Eich’s scalp care about him or his $1,000 donation to defend marriage? They’re already forgetting his name and moving on to the next target. Eich just happened to make a good target. The Mozilla Foundation is shaky, its board was insecure, and once an online dating company cynically came out with a publicity stunt to keep the news cycle churning, the scalp of the man behind Javascript was claimed. If he had hung on for another few days, the whole thing would have gone away.

Next week it will be someone else. And then the week after that.

Opting out of the conflict means standing by while men like Eich are torn down, not because they did anything wrong, but because destroying them allows the left to feel the thrill of its power over people.

Every gang needs to hurt and terrorize people in order to feel its power. Unlike a Chicago street gang which goes in for an honest mugging or beating, the online activists of the left do their dirty work in this way. Afterward there is no blood and there are no bruises, but lives are destroyed and its social justice activists chortle to themselves coming off an adrenaline high before going after someone else.

The purpose of these purges is not to make the country more tolerant, but to make it more afraid. The message of the Eich purge is not, “accept gay marriage,” it’s “don’t question us.” As many have pointed out, Eich had the same view of gay marriage at the time he made that donation as Obama and Hillary.

But Eich wasn’t “us.” He wasn’t a member of the club.

Members of the club can and do make racist jokes. They can oppose gay marriage. They can sexually harass female employees, pay them less and even kill them. They can do all these things because the “club” is not about gay marriage or equal rights for race or gender.

It’s about the supreme power of the club.

You can call the club, liberalism, progressivism or simply “the left.” You can call its members Marxists, Socialists or anything else you like. They go by many names, some real and some fake, but they are the “club”; a totalitarian organization dedicated to absolute power in the name of any available lie.

The left is a totalitarian movement that inverts everything it touches. It fights against poverty by making more men poor. It helps black people by keeping them down, and it promotes tolerance through displays of intolerance. Its endgame is simply raw power. It wants as much of it as it can get its hands on.

We can stand aside, but it will affect us sooner or later. Even if we don’t get picked to be the teachable moment of the day, we will find ourselves in a country that is less free and more oppressive every year.

The idea that any part of the left’s agenda can be delinked and ignored is wishful thinking. The left’s incessant accusations of racism show that the refusal to engage an issue does not take it off the table. It’s the left that determines the content and the context of the conflict. And that’s why the right is losing. It imagines that it can unilaterally retreat to more favorable ground.

That’s a strategy that has yet to work.

The left doesn’t do truces. If the right cedes gay marriage, all it will have won is the right to be called homophobes for the next hundred years. And the culture war will move on to the next issue and the one after that. The purges will continue and more criminals guilty of thought crimes will be paraded for the virtual cameras. Yesterday’s commonplace idea will be tomorrow’s act of unspeakable bigotry that prevents you from being employed, opening a business or even staying out of prison.

You may be in the clear today, but you won’t be tomorrow.

Wars aren’t won by constantly retreating. They’re won by taking a stand for what you believe in.

The left constantly takes stands, but it believes in nothing. Like all totalitarian movements, it worships at the feet of the bronze bull of power. It believes in the virtue of its outrage, the might of its rhetoric and the pleasure of trampling an enemy underfoot. Every one of its beliefs are baseless and expendable in the name of its true god of power.

The right has sold its moral birthright in the hopes of being tolerated by a movement with no morals or beliefs except in the virtue of its own intolerance. It strategically embraces the left’s ideas and hopes that this process will eventually lead to a truce.

It can’t and it won’t.

The left does not hate the right because of gay marriage. It does not hate the right because it thinks that the right is racist, sexist, transphobic, semaphoric or plasmatic. It hates the right because it is not of the left. The right stands in the way of its absolute power. These two things are enough to be hated.

Totalitarian movements are destructive. They feed off conflict and desire absolute power. They cannot be compromised with, reasoned with or appeased. Instead they have to be exposed for what they are.

The only way to beat a totalitarian movement is to expose the dirty little secret that it is not pro-black, pro-gay, pro-woman or pro anything except pro-power. It is a greedy, corrupt and selfish movement that does not stand for a better world tomorrow, but for unlimited abuses of power in the world today.